TSHS Mixer at JSM 2020
On August 3, 2020 the TSHS Section (and many others!) participated in the Joint Statistical meetings virtually. Thanks to COVID-19, we were unable to get together in person, but we wanted an opportunity for people to hear about the section and connect with each other.
After much discussion in the Executive Committee, including the possibility of some kind of avatar meeting like Second Life, we decided to create a Zoom mixer with random breakout rooms for people to chat with a smaller group. This went very well! A total of 42 people were present at some point (39 max at any given time).
Here is an example of the gallery view that attendees saw in the plenary. You can only see 25 at once, unfortunately.
In one of my breakout rooms, I was able to connect with a smaller group of friendly statisticians:
Peter (upper left) was just so excited to see us all! Zoom allows some cool features for this kind of meeting. You never have to ask anybody their name! Also, notice that several of us changed our Zoom names to show our affiliation. That works much better with the larger images in a breakout room than with the full group!
We opened the main session with the usual business matters, discussing what we have been doing, talking about TSHS activities, and so on. We also updated members on the interesting JSM sessions we were sponsoring, and the resources portal of which we are quite proud.
Along the way, to provide some variety, we went into 2 breakout sessions. I had to leave after the first one (too many concurrent activities) but I'm told people stuck around and continued chatting for the full time we had allotted.
As part of the full group session, we honored our best presentation winners from last year, Erin Blankenship and Ella Burnham (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) for their talk "Lessons Learned: Revising an Online Introductory Course" in the session, "Overcoming Challenges in Developing and Deploying Partially and Fully Online Statistics Courses". A paper written based on this presentation is in press at Chance magazine for the TSHS column!
We recognized the 2020 winner of the TSHS Young Investigator Award, Stephanie Hicks (Johns Hopkins University) and the TSHS Outstanding Teacher Award, Heather Hoffman (George Washington University).
We also recognized the ASA Fellows from our section inducted in 2020, both of whom were recommended for this honor by the section. There are another five or so who were also inducted as Fellows and who are members of our section. The two we recommended (both approved) were:
Robert Oster, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Felicity Enders, Mayo Clinic
We did a virtual random door prize raffle, with an Excel random list of attendees! Stata and Cambridge University Press donated the door prizes – thank you!
And thank you to all who attended and made it an enjoyable experience.